I live in the meercat slaughtering/bad parenting/uncontrollable ankle biter state that this particular incident happened.
Kid should get 5 series of rabies shots, just in case. Apt reward for misbehavior.
Parents should have to pay to replace meercats, and perhaps a nice bit of shubbery.
And meercats don’t really taste like chicken. They have a moderately gamy flavor, similiar to snow leopard.
mmmm… snow leopard with snow peas
I was thinking this myself (well, the first part anyway). Would the zoo have a reasonable chance of winning a lawsuit against the parents?
Something about that girl’s actions isn’t ringing true to me.
I know there are 9-year-olds who are capable of damn near anything, but it seems to me that she had to have help from at least one of her parents to achieve the contortions described in the article. However, the Star-Tribune article says the rock is there so kids can crawl up to get a better view. Still, for a 9-year-old to reach down a four-foot-high glass wall enough that a one-foot-tall animal can bite her suggests that one of her parents gave her a boost.
Count me along with those who think her parents should be required to reimburse the Zoo for the meerkats, for the postmortem rabies tests, and for the modifications to the exhibit that their child forced.
Robin
Surely the zoo is looking into this angle, that the parents had extortion in mind? If they find any evidence of this, I hope that they (the zoo) do sue! :mad: With any luck, if it can be proven that child will be put in a safer home, with an aunt/uncle or grandparent.
Smeghead:
Man, I’m glad to hear that. My four-year-old sister was bitten by an aggressive cat in 1979 and had the shots in the abdomen. I helped hold her down; certainly looked painful.
Some people seem to think that any animal they see is a plush toy put there for their amusement.
I mis-read this as “that child will be put down” - :eek:
Wow - you’re even harder-line than I am! 
I wish zoos would grow a pair in cases like this, and simply refuse to kill animals when there are any other alternatives. “Pubilc safety comes first,” my ass. Public safety DID come first, when they put up barriers that people have to actively circumvent to get into trouble.
And if it had been a toddler, than I would suggest that the parents get a series of rabies shots along with the toddler, so everyone learns a good lesson.
How long does it take to test the meerkats for rabies? And how long do you have to get the shots before they’re ineffective, if the animals were infected?
I’m not a parent, but my first thoughts were that I’d have taken the kid to the ER immedietly to get the rabies shots, well before the animals could be tested. Better safe than sorry after all.
Damn submit button…
Anyway, I was actually going somewhere with that. It just seems suspicious to me that the parents would wait for the test results on the meerkats instead of taking some immediate action, especially when considering that the shots are no worse than any other vaccination.
Unfortunately, testing for rabies requires postmortem examination of the animal’s brain. There’s currently no way to confirm whether it’s present without killing the animal.
I’m not going to be able to “cite” this, but I imagine the chances of dying in a car accident on the way to the zoo is higher than the chances of contracting rabies from an animal at the zoo, even if your child gets bit. Rabies is extremely rare these days, and confined animals that have been vaccinated and have shown no signs basically can be said NOT to have rabies, even without a test.
Yeah, I know that. My point was, why wait for the animal to be killed and tested? Why not take the kid straight to the doc for shots instead?
It just doesn’t make sense to me that the parents would wait for the test before administering the vaccine, unless the test could be done quickly.
Now looking over that site, it seems like it would take at least a day to find out if the animals were rabid (I don’t beleive for a second they were), depending on how long it took for them to actually get to the testing facility. Unless I’m reading something wrong.
Sigh…I’m not with it today at all.
By the above quote, I just meant that I know the animal had to be killed/beheaded to be tested. I wasn’t aware of how long that took, though.
No bet – they already demonstrated as much.
If a pet dog bites a kid, and the dog’s rabies vaccination is current, they don’t kill the dog…presumably because they trust the rabies vaccination certification?
These meerkats were vaccinated, but the article doesn’t say anything about “certification”.
When there was dicussion of pet ferrets, I remember one issue was that there existed a rabies vaccination for them, and vets would vaccinate, but the vaccine was not “certified” so they were not officially considered rabies-free even if vaccinated. Maybe it had to do with dosage.
Is that what’s going on here? There’s no legally established rabies-free dosage of vaccine for meerkats, so they had to kill them?
Even though I could understand that, I think it stinks. What if they test negative for rabies but it’s a false negative? The kid would get rabies and die! How reliable is the “brain examination”?
What if the meerkats had been exposed to a rabid animal ten minutes before biting the girl – would brain exam show changes yet? Would rabies be transmissible at that stage?
Even if you think rabies wouldn’t be transmissible from meerkat to human ten minutes after the meerkat was exposed, if you magically knew that the meerkat had just been exposed, wouldn’t you consider it more likely to be dangerous than the actual situation in question (meerkats were vaccinated and had not, as far as was known, been exposed)? Wouldn’t you sure as hell have the child vaccinated immediately, if you knew the meerkat that bit her had just itself been bitten by a rabid animal?
And since in truth, exposure is an unknown, and test results can be imperfect or faked (what if the lab employees are liars, like that crematorium that was hiding bodies and not cremating them?), wouldn’t you, if you were being absolutely prudent, vaccinate the child regardless?
And if you’re NOT being absolutely prudent, if you’re stopping short “in order to spare the child distress”, then do us all a favor and spare the poor meerkats their lives.
I mean, by not vaccinating the child, you’re clearly willing to take a certain level of risk, out of compassion. And the meerkats are known to have been vaccinated; the unknown is (apparently) that the dosage wasn’t “certified”. So sparing the meerkats isn’t increasing the risk to the child by a lot. And you’ve already forfeited the claim that you’d do everything to protect the child (by skipping vaccinating her…not to mention by letting her climb into a wild animal enclosure in your presence).
I just don’t get the logic of it. I’m inclined to think of it as an animal sacrifice to propitiate the gods on the daughter’s behalf, more than an actual scientifically-necessary test. They were killed because that’s what we do, not because we thought things through.
Sailboat
Perhaps, as a lesson, she and her family should be made to witness the animals being put down. And I agree that they should have to pay for the animals (and all the testing).
In Arizona, at least, standard turn around is 24 hours on the lab test. Emergency testing can be done if there is good reason to believe the animal is rabid. (Sailboat, the brain testing is very, very reliable and can identify rabies at any point when it’s contagious. 10 minutes after exposure, it’s not contagious. It’s not contagious for weeks or months after infection.)
Everything I can find, while it recommends that a person at risk begin treatment “as soon as possible”, also says that if the animal is asymptomatic at the time of the bite, it should be quarantined and observed for 10 days. After 10 days, if there is no sign of rabies, the person doesn’t need the shots.
The brain test is used for animals that exibit behavioral or medical sign of rabies, or animals that cannot be safely captured and quarantined. So I have no idea why the law would be written that the animals could be put down, as opposed to quarantined and observed. Is it simply because they’re meerkats, and not dogs?
That was the case only until 1992. There is an approved rabies vaccination for ferrets now, that must be administered yearly. Additionally, like cats and dogs, ferrets should be observed for 10 days for infection if involved in a biting situation.
Count me among those who think that the kid should have been forced to take the shots. As it is, the parents should have to pay to replace the meerkats, and for the cost of putting them down and running the rabies tests.
Didn’t this happen with a couple of bears just a few months ago?
Fucking moron assholes.